The Best Hotels Near La Ciacolada, by the Record
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The restored ballroom still has its original gilded ceiling, which tells you a lot about what kind of hotel this is. Hotel Palace Portorož is a grand seaside resort on the Slovenian Adriatic, with the full complement of formal rooms, three restaurants, two bars, a café, and a 1,500 square meter spa running saltwater pools, saunas, and treatments built around local olive oil, rose, and salt.
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The original wrought-iron banisters are still there, climbing a staircase that predates everyone checking in. This boutique hotel in Izola's old town has ten rooms, and four of them come with private spa lofts, sauna and soaking tub included, which is a quietly extravagant thing to find a short walk from the marina. The rooms run contemporary but don't try to forget the building's age, which is exactly the right call.
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Stone buildings on a medieval hillside in the Istrian interior, close enough to the Adriatic to feel it without being on the water: San Canzian is a small hotel and residences that holds a Michelin Key. The 24 rooms lean contemporary inside walls that are anything but. There's an outdoor pool, an indoor spa, and a restaurant whose menu tilts Italian, which makes sense given you're an hour from Trieste.
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A winery that got ambitious and built a hotel on an Istrian hillside, with a Finnish sauna, a Turkish bath, and a pool overlooking the hills. The architecture swings hard into bold modernism, and the interiors are colorful in a way that suggests the owner has opinions. Inland Croatia rarely draws the crowds that the coast does, which means Motovun stays genuinely quiet, and you can taste through the estate's own bottles without leaving the property.
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A rust-orange facade on the Porec waterfront, with 105 rooms done up in creams and Adriatic blues, parquet floors, and balconies facing either the sea or the old town rooftops. This hotel is an adults-only (16 and up) property steps from the beaches and a private-boat ride from St. Nikola's island. The terrace doubles as a jazz venue when the local scene comes alive, which happens more often than you'd expect for a town this size.
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A 14th-century country manor surrounded by apple orchards in a Slovenian village you won't stumble onto by accident. Kendov Dvorec is a small luxury hotel where every room is furnished with antiques assembled one piece at a time, no two quite alike. The restaurant leans into local Idrija traditions, and the grounds are the kind you actually use, not just admire from a window.
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The building looks like a spaceship that landed in a coastal forest and decided to stay, which makes it the most architecturally improbable hotel on the Adriatic. Guest rooms all have furnished terraces, and the design plays so freely with glass and mirrors that everything inside stays as bright as the outdoor pools. Rovinj's old Venetian quarter is a short drive away, though the forest, beaches, and rotating jazz nights make leaving feel optional.